Today Blizzard announced a new milestone for World of Warcraft. 12 million active subs. If you thought that number had stopped growing, that’s because it had. It’d been holding steady at 11.5 million ever since December 2008. Looks like Cataclysm has given it a shot in the arm.

I know this is evidence of the PC’s importance as a gaming platform and all, but my God, every time Blizzard announce record WoW subscribers it feels like they’re beating up my soul with a sock full of pennies.
Not a month goes by without some great, brave game dropping its developers into hot water by failing to sell enough, and now we have twelve million PC gamers choosing to pay for World of Warcraft twelve times a year? Have you played World of Warcraft recently? Have you seen all the engine hacks the quest designers have been implementing recently to keep quests interesting, no matter the cost to immersion? Sod it. Maybe I should just embrace it.

I know if it’s two words it’s with an N, but I think as one word it’s with two Ms. I’m not sure why but it looks better. In ‘damnit’, the N feels like a little stumbling block, whereas ‘dammit’ flows much more easily (even though they’re pronounced the same, I know, I know).
Plus Chrome’s auto-spellchecker is highlighting damnit as being misspelled and leaving dammit as it is.

I’m going back for Cataclysm but after that…never again. I added up all the money I have ever spent on my sub and in total I could have upgraded my current machine to play better games than WoW. I am so angry at myself!

We are saving the world. We could be getting our thrills by shooting big game or tearing down the street with a hot-rod automobile, or making babies, but instead we choose to sit in chairs for many hours a day. We’re at least saving calories, my gut proves that.

Yeah, what Spinks said. I play City of Heroes and L4D1 and 2 regularly with friends who also play WoW. Granted, IMO they aren’t getting very good value for their money paying for WoW monthly when they don’t spend a lot of time playing it, but it’s their money and they can spend it however they like. They don’t owe that money to other games’ developers just because we’re all supposed to hate WoW and love… something else. They aren’t doing anything wrong or anything we ought to be angry about.

I’m not going back for Cataclysm.
Had a lot of good times in WOW and made some friends I still have today, but it’ll eat your life.
I still spend most of my free time playing games, but ah, the games you can play these days that aren’t WOW. Plus none of them require you to log in at set times, rushing home from work to do your second, unpaid, job of end-game raiding. Bleh.

Former colleagues who worked on various MMOs (such as Ultima Online and Asheron’s Call) told me that, if I recollect correctly, about 10% of their income was from subscribers who weren’t actually playing the game. It’s one of the dirty secrets of MMOs – the ideal “customer” has always been considered to be the non-player who forgot to cancel their subscription.
I think the number of non-playing subscribers for WoW are smaller though, in part because their “subscriber numbers” are already heavy on the shenanigans – they’re counting players in Asia who don’t pay monthly subscriptions as “subscribers.” So there may be people in China with a half-hour’s worth of game-time left on their pre-paid cards who aren’t ever going to play again but are being lumped in with the “active subscribers,” even though Bliz will never get another cent from them.

“World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees’ territories are defined along the same rules. ”

@ Quintin: Do you get similarly upset about other devs making money from people who pay tens of [currency] for a game and don’t play them or get beyond the first hour or so?

Because plenty of us do it. I know it’s not the same as wasting a monthly subscription but the point is still plenty of developers getting making lots of money from games that a decent chunk of their buyers didn’t play much of.

Not a month goes by without some great, brave game dropping its developers into hot water by failing to sell enough, and now we have twelve million PC gamers choosing to pay for World of Warcraft twelve times a year?

I sympathize, Quinns, but that line of thinking leads to madness. It’s best to recognize that the vast majority of Blizzard’s audience isn’t comprised of potential crossover customers for those other games.

Perhaps not all of them, but a substantial number of gamers are putting all the game time and/or money into WoW instead of dozens of other games that they’d buy if WoW didn’t exist. A friend of mine was (ironically) working at Blizzard when WoW was being made, and he sadly told me, “MMOs are going to be the death of PC gaming.” Luckily he wasn’t (completely) right, but there is something to it… you subtract the money that’s going to WoW out of the PC game industry, and the PC games aren’t looking as good as they were before WoW came along.

People aren’t playing other MMOs because of WoW, sure. But that’s because, on most metrics, Blizzard’s product is the most polished, well designed, user-friendly, and plain magical of the lot. It’s an extraordinarily good game.

As to whether they’ve been lured away from cool singleplayer games, I honestly couldn’t say, but I think most of those games are being ignored by the gaming populace at large anyway.

“Perhaps not all of them, but a substantial number of gamers are putting all the game time and/or money into WoW instead of dozens of other games that they’d buy if WoW didn’t exist.”

I doubt the appeal of these other games would be any more or less if said players weren’t playing WOW, so can I ask: what’s stopping those people buying those games? My theory is, *shock horror*, they’re not actually interested in them. If I wasn’t playing WOW, I wouldn’t suddenly change my attention to… oh, I don’t know, Assassin’s Creed, because it still wouldn’t interest me. Perhaps people are playing WOW in droves because it’s a charismatic (LITERARY FOLKS: I didn’t say “deep”, “intelligent”, or “high-quality”. I’m under no illusions that most of WOW’s fiction is b-movie trash) world of fantasy races, battles, and other such concepts. What are the alternative RPGs if you like that setting? Dragon Age? No. It’s faux-dark fantasy. WOW fills a niche, quite a sizeable one, granted.

In the end, you can’t suppose that without WOW people would flock to other games. That’s a patronising, assumptive attitude.

I understand the sadness. But it’s better than them being Sims players, right? At least this way they’re discovering the concept of ‘clans’. Er… clans are funny. I’ve been in a few, I’ve ran one, and I both do and don’t miss them. OMG I’m gonna cry.

Jail time? Are you kidding me? It doesn’t work like that. Magic numbers like the 11,5 million subs is one of their main marketing points apart from the mohawk grenade ads on TV. Press releases like that spawn a huge huge pile of ‘news’ about WoW.

As the Asians haven’t had access to Wrath of the witch king since what, February of 2010 or so, and that being the biggest market causing the growth of the WoW user base, there’s something fishy going on with those numbers for sure. Just do the math.

“I’m pretty sure the amount of player has been decreasing, even with the latest expansions because of the global economic crisis”

The last recession during the 70s coincided with a marked increase in alchohol purchase and drug use, and not because people suddenly had far more free time to party. I’d suggest that, to an extent, MMOs seeing a subscription boost is for similar reasons.

I also vaguely remember an article in the Times a couple of years ago predicting a rise in playerbase simply because it offers a months worth of entertainment for very little when compared to going out. Maybe I can dig it up.

PHeMoX, please check your facts before posting. Wrath was launched in China this august and corporations are legally obliged to supply correct numbers. Doing otherwise is called fraud. Master of none is correct on that one.

Also, something to remember is that WoW is the best MMO out there for the average player. I know, I know… it hurts because we think everyone should have a Donkey Kong Arcade machine signed by Steve Wiebe, and a Saturn JUST for NiGHTS, propped up by one of 4 copes of E100, signed by Miyamoto.

But the fact is, nothing has come close to WoW. It still looks fair, and many people just wouldn’t associate with their EvE pod (yes, I died a lot.. WTB a spaceship) the way they do with their Melee Night Elf Male Hunter, sporting two daggers and a Mohawk. He’s cool.

I honestly wonder how well ToR will do in comparison; it’s not rooted in like WoW (obv) but Bioware + Star Wars has never been bad.

Tei: there are a few unique abilities that each race gets, but apart from that classes tend to have the same abilities whichever race you choose. Your race is mostly a cosmetic decision, so you won’t have to choose a certain play style and then be stuck with a character you don’t like the look of.

I do not use McDonalds as my reference point for good food. There is no reason to start doing this with computer games. As a gamer Dark Age of Camelot was my gold standard. It was not accessible but was more innovative and did more for multiplayer gaming than WoW will ever manage.

Is actualy not a simple MMO, WoW is accesibility at it’s finest, that does not make is simple.

You can play it very casually in wich it’s in essence a simple game, you quest, do a bit battlegrounds or some arena on the side, then you do some 5 man dungeons, and is a perfectly good playstyle and you will get rewards for your efforts in gear, pets, mounts, achievements.

Or you can go to the other side of the spectrum and delve into Heroic 25 man Raiding, and be thrown into extreme complex fights, where each point of your character sheet really matters where the min-max rules, and off game spreadsheets are almost a must. Or perhaps you want competitive arenas where mastering all your class spells, and knowing not only your class, but all the other class what can counter you, whatt you can counter, waht your partners need to be doing, and making split second decissions to win or lose are common.

Or you can be like most of people somehwere in between that and enjoy the game like you want, that’s the thing no other mmo managed to get near, WoW is as simplel of complex has the player wants it to be, that’s why it has 12 million people paying for it

There’s a lot more than 12 million gamers in the world. To act as if somehow WoW has eaten all of them and nobody is left to buy other games in the market is downright absurd. Maybe when someone makes an MMO as polished, expansive, and as accessible as Warcraft, its time will end. Nobody has cracked that yet. Getting angry at the people who play Warcraft about it seems backwards.

I mean of course there’s other factors, like most people who play warcraft have friends who play warcraft, but plenty of other successful MMO’s exist, migration does occur.

There are certainly more than 12 million gamers in the world (although there weren’t close to 12 million MMO players before WoW came along). The thing is, MMOs in general are designed to be time-sinks. You could easily spend all your gaming time just playing one MMO; there’s also a minimum amount of time that you need to put in, as a player, to have it be worthwhile to even play. So the end result is that playing an MMO takes up more time than playing any other (non-MMO) game; of course MMO players will play fewer games as a result (I know a number of WoW players who have given up all other gaming). This is offset somewhat by the fact that WoW has created its own audience to some degree – I know of a lot of people who have played WoW who wouldn’t have thought about playing RPGs otherwise. Overall, however, MMOs may be causing the industry to lose out. If you look at PC games revenue, and subtract the WoW portion, the industry is in worse shape than before WoW appeared.

“Maybe when someone makes an MMO as polished, expansive, and as accessible as Warcraft, its time will end.”

Those games already exist. LotRO for one, which even has a license and lore that everyone and their mum knows and loves. WoW just has too many players now who’ve all invested too much time to want to quit for an alternative game. The only reason I managed to quit was by moving to NZ (from the UK), making playing on the Euro servers infeasible and really not wanting to start again on Oceanic servers.

I’d be slightly confused if that figure has gone up recently, there’s been nothing particularly worthwhile added to WoW’s content since… last December? I would’ve expected their active subscriptions to drop for the time being.

Won’t be re-subbing for Cataclysm myself, primarily because if I kept on renewing in anticipation of new content, I’d be stuck forever. That, and they seem to have decided that an ever stricter need for mana conservation is the only thing that makes healing interesting. As if I didn’t have enough bars on my screen to watch for hours.

I actually only give them money twice a year! But then if I didn’t spend it on wow, I’d only buy more alcohol with it.
Also, I think that in a game with that many players, immersion’s going to be a little bit out of reach, especially in the more populated areas. Like cities where spam of [Dirge] and anal as a prefix and pathetic 14 year old attention whores and their assorted 35-year old basement-dweller admirers is sadly prevalent. Even legitimate messages like LFG etc spoil the experience a bit but that’s not why I play; I have single player games for that.

“Have you played World of Warcraft recently? Have you seen all the engine hacks the quest designers have been implementing recently to keep quests interesting, no matter the cost to immersion?”

What do you mean by this, Quinns?

There’s a huge and substantial argument in defence of WOW being an important PC game, deserving of the praise it garners and the money it makes, and a damn lot of misunderstandings going around. To an extent, this is down to WOW’s dated early levels, giving new players a limpid introduction of a game circa 2005, without all the cool, later additions witnessed in Outland, Northrend, and the other new zones added since launch. having played 20 or so hours worth of the updated early leveling experience in Cataclysm, it’s shaping up to be an enjoyable, frequently surprising game. There are a lot of neat ideas in it now, that really show Blizzard weren’t happy with how conventional and staid things were before.

If you’re referencing those very quests when you mention the breaking of immersion, then I partly agree; there are a few quests that have nice ideas, but the implementation is so lazy that characters or NPCs literally pop into existence, or disappear into nothingness. But isn’t that what the beta test is meant to do away with?

There is a lot of quality to WOW, even now: its iconic environments burst with personality. The world design of the game is wholly impressive, considering the limitations of the engine (and that’s why, I think, they’re forced to go down the cheapy-chatty route a lot of the time: because of how incompatible the engine is with a lot of scenes), and the interface remains the best in an MMO.

Also: WOW players aren’t drones. They have other gaming hobbies, too. WOW is often there in the background, being paid for on the side, while other games are played. I’m not convinced WOW is the murderer of unfortunate indie studios at all; to suggest such is a red herring. It’s a more amphibious beast than all that.

When it was released, I was attending a digital art school with a plan to eventually work on video games, mainly FPSs. When I first heard of WoW from an outsider’s view, I didn’t get it, mainly because of the outdated graphics.But then I was disgusted at all those failing classes because of their addiction to WoW. It easily became something I would make fun of someone for playing, because I thought they were idiots.

Then a year later I decided for the sake of education, to play the free trial of WoW. I was absolutely impressed with it’s quality. I played for the duration of the trial and then bought one month subscription to see where it went, and enjoyed it. None of my friends played so It was a solo experience. I no longer made fun of WoW players, the game is fun. Blizzard knows how to make games. Later on I rejoined the game with my girlfriend at the time along with my brother and a close friend, the game was exponentially more enjoyable.

I then sampled this “End game” people were talking about, and it’s challenge was interesting but the people and their motives, I think, were a bit skewed in that they played it like an unpaid job and seemed to blur the line of ‘playing’ the game and having a ‘life’ at the same time.

Unfortunately, this is the idea WoW has stamped in the minds of many people. It makes people think only the idiots who sacrifice their lives for an outdated grind play this game. that couldn’t be far from the truth. The truth is, the game is 6 years old so it retains some older mechanics that seem brain-dead, (for example: low drop rate collection quests) a lot of these things are on their way out the door. Blizzard knows whats fun, they know how to make a game appeal to newcomers just as much as it does to unemployed basement dwelling raiders. their ability to do this, and retain the amount of quality they do is worth every single subscription.

I currently play 1-3 hours a night on an RP server with my girlfriend. Shes a writer, so it gives us some great points of conversation in and out of the game.

I think people get a bit too flame crazy when it comes to WoW. It’s a great game.

I stopped playing FPS games to play WoW, and ended up multiboxing 5 accounts. Know what the funny thing is? I’m spending less money on 5 subscriptions than I was keeping a PC’s hardware up to date to play the latest Crysis (the last FPS I upgraded for). WoW doesn’t move on like FPS games (and their rather fickle players), and thankfully it’s outdated engine means I shouldn’t have to spend any more on hardware for a long time.

My guild makes fun of me regularly for having 5 accounts, but I’m not the one with Loremaster (like anyone with that has spent time to read the quests and learn the lore), pets from the Blizzard Store, or tens of thousands of gold from doing dailys, daily (OK so I did the Argent Tournament dailys until I had Crusader on each account, but only so I could buy some extra heirlooms. I’ve now got 5x shaman sets ready for goblins in cataclysm ;) ).

What I will say though is that WoW is a great game buried under the weight of at least 6 million players who are only playing because everyone else is. Players who don’t get RPG, don’t get the story behind the game (which is at least as broad as that of LotR) and who are really only interested in pwning noobs and getting phat lewt (with minimal effort).

Thankfully multiboxing lets me get away from them and do some of the dungeons at my own pace, where they really become far more immersive without people bunny hopping all over the place and complaining to go faster because they have to go eat their tea in 10 minutes. I do like to do random instances after 3am though, when the players seem to get a lot more polite.

Claiming that WoW is somehow responsible for the failure of other games is silly. Playing WoW since launch hasn’t stopped me from buying well over 100 games in the last 5 years and most of the people I play with play plenty of other games as well. Add to that that WoW has made plenty of non-gamers try out using their PC for playing game. It’s not like the WoW terms of service has you agree to never buying or playing other games.

Not liking a game is fine, but I’ve come to expect more than silly whining with no substance from RPS.

I play WoW. I get more than my monies worth of entertainment from it on a monthly basis. So do 12 million others apparently.

I also play all the mainstream titles that I’m interested in and basically every indie title of note.

Please drop the misconception that if you play an MMO it is at the expense of all others. I play a LOT of games, not just WoW. It’s hardly my fault that these great, brave games don’t sell enough… I even bought Auto Assault and APB for christ sake!

They were the most dramatic examples of a game collapsing due to lack of sales that I had also given money to.

Besides, both of those games arguably had a TON of promise despite being released unfinished; which is far more likely to have been behind their lack of sales than WoW being more successful. That’s another argument altogether, though.

WoW is successful because it’s still the best of it’s kind. I wish it wasn’t. I want something new to turn up and blow it out of the water like it did to EQ but nothing has so I’ll keep enjoying WoW until then.

“WOW players aren’t drones. They have other gaming hobbies, too. WOW is often there in the background, being paid for on the side, while other games are played.”

Anecdotally, this has not been the case for my friends (and me when I played WoW). If a friend starts up WoW I know they won’t be playing anything else till they cancel their subscription. Again, this has just been my experience, but I know I felt like I was “wasting time” with other games since I was paying a monthly sub for WoW.

While I – kinda – understand all the WoW-hatred, you have to admit it is by *far* the best MMORPG out here.

All other MMO failed to rival WoW. WAR Online, AoC, Allods Online, etc. I don’t see that changing anytime soon, saddly.

What most of you people seem to be mad about regarding WoW are infact common MMO mecanics and behaviors: grinding, raiding, trolling, etc. You can perfectly play WoW without doing any of this.

Oddly, many people so-called mature gamers who hate WoW (with or without a reason) are the first to put Eve Online on a pedestal, even though this game is plagued by the same problems (and other ones).

I agree with Meneldil. There is no denieing that WOW is a fun game. One might not agree with the use of grinding but WOW has actually less grind than most MMOs.
Also I think it’s a bit unfair to bash on engine “hacks”. Zoning for example is a feature that may be percieved as slightly hackish but it still serves its purpose and enables WOW to tell its quest stories with much more impact on the gameworld than other MMOS typically allow.

I’d say its pretty impressive for such an old game. I might even be tempted to go back for cataclysm later next year.

Problem with mmorpgs, and mmos as a whole for that matter, is that they’re plagued with people who fall into fandom for their game of choice like nerdy hooligans for their local soccer team (probably has something to do with the whole engagement, incentive and lifespan of the game, far longer than any PC or console game around).

This creates a strange phenomenon where the guys who’ve been there since WoW are rock hard thinking that they’re playing “the best mmorpg out there”, disregarding everything else – especially games that came before and were, for a whole lot of reasons, far more rich and clever gameplay-wise.

Ergo, people who have a better picture overall, been-there-done-that since the 90’s (such as yours truly) tend to get a little tense toward the vocal majority considering said vocal and paying majority have inclined the whole genre toward WoW-likeness for more than five years now.

Actually, to find WoW to be the best mmorpg out there is like saying Harry Potter is the best book series around because you’ve discovered reading with it. Well, consider other guys have learned reading with War & Peace, and understand why they can get angry at the thought that the future will be more about Rowling than Tolstoy because the mainstream, easy stuff is always what the lambda human being will go for.

And I’m not saying Harry Potter isn’t good, it’s pretty good. WoW’s good too, but objectively you have to admit it’s really poor compared to Tolstoy… hmmm… wait. Well you get the idea.

Anecdotally, I had more fun in the first twenty levels of Tabula Rasa then I ever had in WoW. No exceptions, really. Had more fun in Champions Online just punching bad guys.

WoW may be king. It can be king all it wants! But when someone finally manages to marry good design to fun gameplay and enough content to hold people long enough so they can make more content? That will be the WoW killer. Until then, WoW could denigrate to nothing more than a chat box and it would still hold people.

I believe that was long as it does well, it’ll do well. But the second a competent MMO that all the idiots that sucked to group with can play, Warcraft will hemorrhage like a hemophiliac in a Mussolini-style beatdown. I know that I only stuck around for a few months extra because I liked the people I hung out with. Take that away, and you’ve got a rather bland game. A bland, unbalanced, poorly written, unimaginative, and yet somehow still addicting, game.

Wayne, if WoW is Harry Potter I am genuinely interested to know what you consider to be the Tolstoy of MMOs/games.

The difference between literature and games is that the english language has been in a completed form for a very long time, it changes a little over time but it doesn’t improve as such. The only thing that can make a book great is what it is about and how it is written. There are no game mechanics, no hardware requirements or breakthroughs in graphics.

Unlike the written word, games are being written in a “language” that isn’t done yet. I’m not sure that it ever will be and, as such, games generally improve with time. This is not always the case, some classic games will always be classic because they were well written (see my point about literature above. A good story is a good story.), because they were the first to do something innovative or the first to take an innovative idea and do it well. The problem here is that those things only serve to make a game memorable, being the first to do something does not immediately make you better than those to do it after you. The ones that come after tend to take the idea and refine it.

The reason that I ask for an example from you is that, not only am I genuinely interested (I’m not going to pass up the opportunity to play a game that is better than one of my favourites!), but also because I fear that you may have a case of rose tinted glasses here. You say that those claiming that WoW is the best MMO out there are the ones who discovered MMOs with WoW. I started playing MMOs with Everquest, among others. I have some very, very fond memories of that game but it’s basically all nostalgia talking. It was bloody good for its time but we’ve moved on now. Despite my fondness for WoW, I can’t wait until we move on from that too.

Immersion in WoW was gone the second a night elf first discovered the jump key.

To be honest, if Quinns is looking for immersion in an MMO, he’s going to waiting a damn long time. Because MMOs have other people in them, and you can never rely on every other person acting ‘in character’ and not breaking immersion for you.

Given that, it’s hardly fair to blame Blizzard for putting gameplay over ‘immersion’, anymore than it is to blame anyone putting gameplay over ‘graphics’.

Sheesh.
We worry that PC gaming as a platform is in decline, and at the same time complain about games when they get too popular? Sorry but this takes me back to being a teenager and having my friends rave about the Pixies….until of course everyone else liked them too and they became “uncool.”

WOW is an easy target, because it is successful and accessible . Blizzard aren’t bad developers, overly greedy or even lazy. They haven’t raised the monthly payment or forced game-improving micro-transacations (just e-peen pets) and they genuinely seem to listen to their player-base. The expansions aren’t cynical cash-ins. They work for their money. Ripe pickings for snobbishness and great for fostering that burgeoning elitist complex there though.

You can complain all you want about the gameplay, its all a matter of taste. Or how Blizzard aren’t progressive, how WOW has stagnated the whole genre and is generally knobbing it up for the others (but well, you’d be talking shite if you said that last part) , but does pop always have to eat itself?

I enjoyed WOW for a couple of years. Along with a few other games. I played Eve too…..but then it’s OK to do that cos it is inaccessible, community driven and erm….not WOW.

There is lots to criticise WOW for, but really do people have to be so sour about it?

While I – kinda – understand all the WoW-hatred, you have to admit it is by *far* the best MMORPG out here.

That depends on what you want from a MMO. I don’t think it’s the best. The most polished, certainly, but far from the best in terms of gameplay.

I have basically two things I want from a MMO:
– lots of players, and
– lots of player interaction

WoW still fiddles around with those tiny servers with what, 2-3000 players online on each. That is ridiculous. Eve has what, 65000 players online on a single server cluster on a good day. *That* is massive. That appeals to me because it means I’ll be playing with and against an entire world of players, not just my guildmates, a bajillion NPCs and mobs and a few other random players.

WoW confines the player interaction, basically reducing itself to a lobby from which you can launch a series of minigames. “Hey, wanna go kill this or that boss?” “Hey, wanna do a battlefield? A raid?” “Or we can hang out in town at the auction house, I guess…”

Whereas Eve gives me what I *want* from a MMO: a freeform world. Something shaped by players and which affects the players in it in return. In Eve, most of what you can spend your time on is possible only because of other players. Trading is a profitable career because there are other players buying and selling goods across the universe, and because there are so many of them and they’re spread across such huge distances, that you actually perform a needed service as a trader.

Yes, Eve has a lot of gameplay issues, but they’ve got one key feature right: they’re not trying to be a larger RPG, they’re a MMO. A massively multiplayer game. A game focused on the players themselves.

Even if Eve failed at everything else (and I don’t quite think it does), and WoW’s gameplay was just absolutely perfect (I don’t think it is), I’d still say Eve was a better MMO simply because it embraces the possibilities of the MMO genre, while WoW still tries to keep its players *apart* in every way, to *prevent* the players from doing anything that isn’t possible in other genres.

If I want coop monster-bashing I can just play Diablo with my friends. If I want small standalone PvP matches, I can play TF2 or any of a million other games, with no monthly fee. If I want to just talk to people, I’ve got an IRC client, again, with no monthly fee.

I don’t need to pay $15/month for access to a lobby allowing me to choose between these activities.

Whereas Eve provides something that *isn’t* available from other games.

And yet, none of those individual activities play anything like the WoW equivalent, nor do they form any sort of interconnected whole, which I assure you WoW does. I mean, I definitely agree that EVE caters to a very different market and I don’t begrudge you preferring it to WoW (whereas I find it incredibly offputting. I hate open PvP, hate player economies, and hate the way it disconnects character improvement from playing the game.). But if I could get the same things I get out of WoW from those other games you mention, I’d be playing those instead.

And yet, none of those individual activities play anything like the WoW equivalent

But they could. That’s my point. WoW doesn’t actually make use of the unique possibilities that being a MMO offers. They just use it to provide a more refined versions of existing non-MMO games.

This is interesting though. If you’re a representative sample of a WoW player, then people aren’t actually playing it because it’s a MMO. They don’t actually *need* those 2000 other people on their server, since they don’t want to kill them, and don’t want to trade with them, and could, in principle, just as well play a 32-player NWN mod.

That’s an interesting perspective. Certainly makes the MMO genre look a lot more shaky. If people aren’t actually playing MMOs for the MMO aspects, then the fact that WoW has 12M subscribers says a lot about the quality of the non-MMO competition, sadly.

That’s not strictly true though, I know a few people who really enjoy playing the economy game, manipulating trade across the whole faction, our guild and others have set up some open world stuff, attacking enemy cities, having little events and so on. Having a large number of players is an important thing in WoW although of course I can understand if the emphasis on things that involve very large numbers aren’t as large as you’d want from an MMO. I personally really like having a smaller tight group of friends doing things in a larger context.

Well, for starters, there are a lot of people playing WoW who do enjoy PvP to various extents. I’m just not one of them. Secondly, there isn’t a single game outside the MMO genre that offers the sort of huge, sprawling, multiplayer enabled world to explore that WoW does. The closest thing to it would be something like Oblivion or Fallout 3, but those are strictly singleplayer. Nor do they generally contain the breadth of experience. And I have a hard time seeing singleplayer or small group multiplayer games of the non-MMO variety getting the sort of continued attention and content expansion that many MMOs do, as they don’t have the continual revenue stream to fund development.

But you’re right that, if I had options that captured the sort of experiences I enjoy in WoW with a small group of friends (and 3-player is more than I can generally muster in a non-MMO context with my circle of friends, so that alone would be hard to arrange), I would not particularly need the context of 2000 other people on the server. Indeed, I personally have a peculiar sort of love/hate relationship with the genre where I wish people would develop many fewer MMOs and many more singleplayer or small group cooperative RPGs, and find a lot of MMOs fundamentally kind of tedious much of the time, yet I’ve gone and betaed and/or purchased probably 50+% of the market, including virtually every one of any real fame. Go figure.

Not much interest in the WoWorld here. Played a couple of days on someone else’s account years ago and came away unimpressed. Though I apparantly don’t like any Blizzard games at all.

The tough thing about WoW is that it raises expectations for all the other developers. Despite the fact that it’s a one time hit. Like Ebay or Paypal or certain others, it was at the right place, right time to seize awareness and become the 800 pound gorilla of MMOs. And it had advertising. Real advertising. I recall seeing an ad for it in a movie theater that I thought was a trailer for an upcoming film. It was great! Until the WoW moniker flashed up.

Noooo, Quinns! Don’t do that! People like you might be the last, best hope for MMORPGs that don’t involve a necessary bajillion addons, grinding, and content that eats at one’s very soul. Don’t go over to the dark side!

I was talking to that chap who was just wearing boxers backstage while we waited for the soundalike competition. Oh, and Quinns? That 1% is probably cancelled out by another 1% that play the game for free; Blizzard employees’ family and friends.

WoW is like America. Big, rich, arrogant, stupid, biggot, prude, lame, loved by everyone, being everywhere on the world, annoying everyone with their rules and laws, some are loathed ny it…and you have to pay both if you want to enter.

Btw and for what it’s worth, I’m with you on this one Quinn. Sometimes, one has to take a stand to condemn what he thinks isn’t right. And WoW’s not right, not at all.

In past times, we would have hunted the WoWies everywhere they hid and burned their ghoulish bodies so the corruption wouldn’t spread in the common genetic pool. But now ? Do that and people will swear to god you’re crazy.

Talk about liberalistic nonsense.

PS: joking appart, ofc WoW players will cry. Let them cry, cause the alternative would be to roll with the mainstream shit and seek the consensus in everything. You’re entitled to your opinion and so are the readers, journalism doesn’t mean you have to have them agree with you.

Remember of those “12m” susbcribers over half are in Asia (China) and bit less than half are in the West (US, Europe). Approximately ~6-7M subs are in China and ~5-6M in the West. While those subs in the West pay the $15/month, those in China pay a much different rate. They pay by the hour via time cards so the implied payment per month is much lower, as it comes out to average around ~$5 or so per month.

The recent “surge” in the user growth from 11.5M to 12.0M is coming from China. In September Blizzard finally launched WoLK in China. This has led to a modest boost in “subs” in China. Now, with Cataclysm coming in December, the Western subs number could also see a slight jump up. But lets put this in perspective, WoW has been running at 11M subs for a few years so the move up to 12M is not some huge jump. However, it is still impressive in that they can keep growing the game after 6 years which is remarkable testament to the staying power of this game.

WoW is providing Activision to the tune of a bit over $1B+ in annual revenue with around 45-50% operating profit margins. This and Call of Duty are keeping Activision afloat.

WOW has a huge stigma enforced upon it, and it’s got to the point that people thoughtlessly chime in with whatever snobbish, unkind, vitriolic comment they can think of, whether it be about the game itself, the playerbase, or the developers. For a site we’re told is based on optimism and positive thought, RPS’s tone sure does turn sour and wry when the subject of the day is World of Warcraft. WOW’s problems are inflated, and its negative impact upon the industry and those who play it is exaggerated to hyperbolic lengths.

So people might not be playing WOW while paying for it…? Subscriptions of all kinds, including cinema card subs, have this pitfall. Hell, the TV licence fee has it too. It’s perfectly easy to cancel a subscription – signing up for an account in the first place is a more complicated endeavour – but the assumption is made that WOW players are too thick, too passive, too lazy, to cancel a drain on their wallet.

The saddest thing about this is that the mainstream games media, RPS included, simply doesn’t want to engage with WOW at all, seeing it as a manifestation of a lot of what is wrong with the medium. Why that is sad is twofold: one, because it does a disservice to the millions of PC gamers who play both WOW and other games, and don’t want to be caricatured as part of a slack-jawed mass of people wasting their time when they could be playing allegedly more worthy games, and two, because WOW is such a varied titan that there is lots and lots and lots to think and write about. Some of its ideas frankly cry out for considered games journalism, equally as interesting as the material written about Bioshock, or Total War, or Left 4 Dead. Yes, the downfall was that these nuggets of gaming gold were hidden behind a wall of primitive MMO gaming in WOW’s earliest stages, but with Cataclysm rocketing the quality of the opening stages of the game, I hope that outlets like RPS give the game another look.

Yes, it has had bags of money thrown at it, a luxury the vast majority of games don’t get, but the developers themselves are insanely passionate about what they do; Cataclysm is a ride made as much for nostalgia as it is for the new and fresh. Yes, occasionally the developers screw up and take pop-culture references a step too far (leading to the debacle of the Mr. T grenades; something which only Blizzard could have found amusing), and yes, there are still some aspects of the game aging horribly (why no Public Quest system, Blizz?), but Cataclysm has invoked a lot of emotions in me; whether it’s the big story of how the titular cataclysm has shaken the world, or the little stories that deal with the plight of, among other things, the poor, poor Tauren who’ve been displaced, preyed upon, and hounded. WOW engages with its players a lot more than it used to, and, like others have said, it’d be nice if RPS (and its readership) stopped taking the imaginary moral highground, and started to be a bit more fair to a five-year old game in the process of reinventing itself.

Mainstream medias wanting nothing to do with WoW ? Puh-lease, you gotta be kidding.

Also: funny how only mmo articles turn into wall-of-text ranting around here. Says a lot about the kind of blind commitment driving many of the mmo players (and I don’t say that as negatively as it seems, being a long time mmo player myself).

Careful guys, what it’ll end up to is that RPS will not be writing about mmos anymore.

I’ll gladly admit I have absolutely no clue what’s added in Cataclysm, or pretty much any of the other WoW expansions. But it’s my impression that they don’t really fix what I consider the most glaring flaw of the game, which I also mentioned in an earlier comment:

They don’t actually exploit the MMO aspect at all. It’s great that they’re adding more polish to an already very polished game. It’s great that they’re adding more story to the game. That’s just not what I’m looking for in a MMO. If I want story, I’d rather player a singleplayer game, where I don’t have 2000 other idiots jumping around ruining the immersion.

To the extent that I take a “moral high ground”, it’s in that I consider WoW a big wasted opportunity. I know a lot of people find it an enjoyable game, I’m just depressed that it doesn’t actually play as a MMO at all. It’s not a game about a lot of players interacting in a big cohesive world. It’s a game about the Blizzard-provided content, story and quests, the Blizzard-provided framework for isolated tournament-like PvP matches, the Blizzard-provided mobs and bosses.

To me, that’s not a MMO. That’s just a lot of people playing a multiplayer RPG in parallel, like all the small groups of players playing Diablo at the same time. Each play with their own group, without really being affected by the thousands of others playing the game.

That is what I’d like to see WoW reinvent about itself. Until it does that, I consider it a ridiculously polished but ultimately generic game. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s bad. As long as people enjoy playing it, it’s obvious they’re doing something right.

I just don’t think it has anything unique to offer. It’s like this week’s generic pop music hit, or the current action movie. Yes, it might be entertaining, yes the visual effects might be top notch, and yes, they might have run Autotune so heavily over the song that you don’t notice the singer can’t actually sing and the tune might be catchy, but its existence adds nothing to the medium as a whole. Just like WoW hasn’t really advanced the MMO genre in any way. They’ve certainly popularized it, and they’ve polished the “traditional” formula to near perfection, but what they haven’t done is broken new ground and really showed us what a MMO can or should be.

Again, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad product. In particular, I don’t think it has any major “problems” as such, and I don’t really think it has a negative effect on the industry. The only major negative effect associated with WoW is the way it makes nearly all other MMO developers go “me too” and just produce less polished WoW clones instead of actually doing something new. But that’s not Blizzard’s, nor the WoW players’ fault.

I also agree that this article was more negative than is really called for.

I don’t see a reason to hate WoW, or be upset by it. I just don’t think the game is very interesting to discuss or critique. And yes, it’s quite possible that this makes me an unfair snob and all the other things you say. It’s possible that I’m entirely wrong, and that I just haven’t realized all the truly unique ideas that the game has contributed to the MMO genre.

WoW is a -huge- evolutionary leap from the prior MMO space. Perhaps even revolutionary. These days it stands out largely for being super-polished and full of stuff (and the one everyone is playing), but the move to quest-centric levelling alone makes WoW about 10000% more playable than predecessors like Everquest.

To Wayne, again. (Your posts seem to be good at getting under my skin!)

There aren’t many posts on RPS that are genuinely hostile towards a popular game/genre. If Quinns had written a scathing article about any other popular game, implying that it had little worth and blaming it’s players for the death of many other, apparently more worthy, developers because they had the gall to spend money on something else that they enjoy then, yes, I imagine that articles comments would have “wall-of-text” ranting as well.

I think WoW has done many good things, besides actually being a pretty good, light-hearted, contemporary important game. It has expanded the medium of gaming and made it available to an even larger audience. It has raised the bar for polish in games and made several innovative contributions to the genre. There is a certain cold-mindedness behind WoW’s success that I think many other games companies could learn from – and I don’t think Blizzard would be where they are today if their hearts were equally cold. (There is love in WoW).

Commercialization of gaming has its upsides and downsides – one of the upsides is that more people play games, and so more people can make games. I don’t think Blizzard is to blame that some companies aren’t able to make their own magic mixture. And as much as I dislike seeing old giants going down; they’re still just companies – their best people will find new havens, and good titles always get (too many) sequels.

Quoting Jim Rossignol, who I agree with when he says (on Perpetuum): “The MMO world has learned nothing from Eve’s approach. It has not understood the power of the single shard world, or the community-grabbing possibilities of creating a game that is more like a giant toolkit for fantasy than it is a storybook or prescribed adventures.”

While the approach “copying EVE to make something better than EVE” could work, for a single title, just as it did with EQ and WoW, I think in the long run the MMO games designer needs to learn how to be more innovative. I think an important part of that challenge is getting better at analysis… and just generally becoming as professional as Blizzard as a company, managing community, building reputation, hunting down the experts you need (like using EQ top guilds for their advice). Etc.

And I want to say something about the “need” to be big and about the versatility of the current indie scene, but it’s late, and who reads this anyway…

I do. And I agree. That’s what nagged me about that particular article as well. Just because the game* is copying something different for a change, doesn’t make it fresh and interesting. It’s still copying. I understand where the thought comes from, but it’s still the wrong mentality.

*can’t even remember the name, just ‘that games that copies EVE’. See?

I actually found WoW kind of revelatory in this regard. I was a bit afraid to try it because of the legendary addictiveness, and I figured my fondness for action RPG’s, co-op RPG’s with friends (Guild Wars in particular), and the Warcraft universe would undoubtedly result in an uncontrollable WoW addiction if I gave it a shot. However, after awhile, with several friends actively playing it, I got curious enough to try out a free trial. I lasted 2 hours before I was so bored I had to close it down and uninstall it. I’ve never touched a true MMO again.

Yeah the old world stuff is pretty bad. I couldn’t have done it if not for the fact that I loved the Warcraft RTSs and the world. Explorering and seeing places from the cutscenes and game was pretty awesome.

If you were to try it again then this expansion would be the best time.

“Looks like Cataclysm has given it a shot in the arm.”
Actually in the lead up to a new expansion the subscriptions tend to go down, not up, due to players getting tired of stagnant content and going elsewhere. The actual shot in the arm is the fact that WoW-China recently got a ‘new’ expansion for the first time in like 3 years.

WoW is pretty fun! Some of my all-time favorite game moments and memories are from the wacky crap that I’ve done or has happened to me in WoW.

i think the game isn’t as goofy, strange or challenging as it used to be, and there is way too much mandatory busy work now, but it will still definitely go down as one of the games I played the most and had the most fun with.